PIERRE BONNARD (1867-1947)
PIERRE BONNARD (1867-1947)
PIERRE BONNARD (1867-1947)
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PIERRE BONNARD (1867-1947)
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PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION
PIERRE BONNARD (1867-1947)

Paysage de Saint-Tropez

Details
PIERRE BONNARD (1867-1947)
Paysage de Saint-Tropez
signed 'Bonnard' (lower left)
oil on canvas
14 3⁄8 x 22 ½ in. (36.3 x 56.1 cm.)
Painted circa 1928
Provenance
Galerie Vildrac, Paris.
The Leicester Galleries, London (by 1937).
R.R. Figgis, Esq., Dublin (by 1944, and until at least 1967).
Anon. sale, Christie's, London, 28 November 1988, lot 20.
Private collection, Canada (acquired at the above sale); sale, Sotheby's, New York, 6 May 2010, lot 198.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.
Literature
J. and H. Dauberville, Bonnard, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Paris, 1973, vol. III, p. 317, no. 1394 (illustrated).
Exhibited
London, The Leicester Galleries, Four French Painters, 1937.
Dublin, Contemporary Pictures Gallery, 1939.
Dublin, National College of Art, Friend of the National Collections of Ireland: Loan Exhibition of Modern Continental Paintings, August 1944, no. 8 (illustrated).
London, Royal Academy of Arts, Pierre Bonnard, Winter 1966, p. 60, no. 196 (dated circa 1928-1930).
Munich, Haus der Kunst and Paris, Musée de l'Orangerie, Pierre Bonnard: Centenaire de sa naissance, October 1966-April 1967, no. 116 (illustrated).
Nottingham, Castle Museum, Pierre Bonnard, May-July 1984, p. 8, no. 132 (illustrated).
Southampton Art Gallery (on extended loan).

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Emmanuelle Loulmet
Emmanuelle Loulmet Associate Specialist, Acting Head of Day Sale

Lot Essay

The Post-impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard moved to Le Cannet in the south of France with his partner Marthe de Méligny in 1924. Some four years later, he executed this luminous vision of the verdant landscape surrounding the neighboring town of Saint-Tropez. The artist used pure, unblended pigments to capture the radiant hues of nature: a lavender and violet sky, dappled with blood orange clouds, above an azure blue mountain range and undulating hills of emerald and jade. This exquisite, distinctly Mediterranean color palette was a signature of Bonnard's work.
Bonnard first visited Saint-Tropez in 1904, and he remained enchanted by the town for several decades thereafter. His landscape paintings reflect his total artistic and philosophical immersion in the Côte d'Azur. In the 1940s, Bonnard wrote to the Fauvist painter Henri Matisse, "During my morning walks I amuse myself by defining different conceptions of landscape, landscape as 'space', intimate landscape, decorative landscape, etc. But as for vision I see things differently every day, the sky, objects, everything changes continually, you can drown in it. But that's what life's about" (quoted in R.R. Brettell, P.H. Tucker and N.H. Lee, Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Paintings in the Robert Lehman Collection, New York, 2009, p. 187).
Unlike the Impressionist landscape painters of the previous generation, however, Bonnard did not always paint en plein air, directly in front of his subject. His nephew later recalled sharing one of the aforementioned walks with the artist, and described how Bonnard was freshly inspired by a familiar view after a rainstorm: "He took a little piece of paper out of his pocket and he made a sketch, and later he painted a picture from it. That was how he worked. He painted nature always from memory, after his walks" (quoted in J. Baxter, French Riviera and Its Artists: Art, Literature, Love, and Life on the Côte d'Azur, New York, 2015, p. 141).
R.R. Figgis, Esq., an Irish collector of modern art, lent this canvas to several important international exhibitions in the mid-twentieth century, including a Bonnard retrospective that traveled to the Royal Academy in London and the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris.

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